The knowledge manager may well be an endangered species as the KM
meme fades and firms rush to stay abreast of complexity, social
networking and chaos theory.
So exactly what did a knowledge manager do and what were they responsible for?
Strategic issues related to individual and group networking &
learning, business intelligence, customer relationships, intellectual
assets and agility.
Influencing, building and changing organizational culture,
practices and policies to enable greater innovation, cultivating awareness, knowledge sharing
and creativity.
Introducing advanced practices to improve knowledge creation and
sharing, such as, tools for building a corporate memory, enabling
virtual forums, stewarding communities of practice, assisting with
informal learning.
Helping create climate that fostered collecting good practices, documenting pitfalls and sharing heuristics.
Knowledge managers are expected to engage and mentor executives in
the finer points of KM – creating open space, building trust, showing a
tolerance for learning via errors, helping with hiring qualities that
promote knowledge flows.
Depending on circumstances, you may be involved with knowledge
audits and mapping, development of taxonomic policy, decisions on
software procurement and adoption and will be expected to lead the firm
in working with tacit knowledge assets.
There are many more roles and competencies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_management
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KM_concepts
IMO these imperatives have not gone away – if anything they
have become more important as firms struggle to understand web2.0, deal
with the ever decreasing half-life of knowledge and faster decision
cycles, battle global competition and rising customer expectations and
power. [Knowledge-at-work]